Customer Reviews

Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician's Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricks

5 star:		(56)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought a copy of Secrets of Mental Maths. As a trained scientist and a professional magician I was interested in the contents, and was not disappointed. Great stuff here for impressing people, and useful techniques for making maths fun. However the Amazon website offered two books togehter - this book and another by the same authors; Think Like A Maths Genius. I ordered both, and was shocked when they were delivered. The second book (Think Like A Maths Genius) was just Secrets of Mental Maths with a different cover. Amazon should have known both were the same book and should not have offered them both together. Don't be caught out by this. That aside, I highly recommend buying one or other version of this book.

At first glance, this book could easily be overlooked and dismissed as another "just buy this book and follow my easy steps to becoming a (genius, millionaire, happier person, psychic, master gardener, whatever)" that would utimately leave you disappointed that you couldn't do it.

Well, this book is not that. It gets right to the point. It's very well written. It's fun. It's practical. And as long as you take your time to mentally practice what you're learning along the way, you can and should be able to master the techniques in this book. You needn't have any mathematical expertise going in. Of course, the author doesn't promise anything special about what you can do with these abilities, although there are some practical applications suggested along the way. All I can say is that it's fun and gives you something interesting to do with your brain when you're bored. And certainly if you like Math already or are a Math teacher, it can be tremendously helpful.

Arthur Benjamin wrote the main content of the book, and Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine founder and Scientific American columnist) wrote introductory and closing chapters. These seem a little out of place to me, but they're certainly very good and useful general information about critical thinking. In addition to Bill Nye's (The Science Guy) new intro, James Randi's (famous magician and skeptic) introduction from an earlier edition is included.

I am a professional SAT/GRE teacher and tutor, achieving an 800 in the GRE math section. After telling many students that the secret to the math section is mental math and approximation, I decided to see what books were available. I saw that this one had good reviews and ever since then I have been bringing the book to all my classes and tutoring sessions. I recommend this book for those who never felt they got the hang of math as well as people who love it like I do. It is clearly written, very encouraging and has lots of drills.
I love this book and I think that it really will help people feel more confident when they take a test or just are trying to figure the tip.

I bought this book in its Kindle version for my PC. I am enjoying it, and happy to see progress in my ability to perform mental calculations. Math was never my strong suit, so this is just what I need.
My only negative comment is that the publisher needs to more carefully edit the text. I came upon three typos within the first couple of chapters, and these were errors in operations signs (for example, "+" instead of "x").

My daughter had always loved math but from last year she became bored by the math curriculum her school uses. I purchased this book and after only four chapters she's engrossed in math again! She loves the tricks and voluntarily makes up her own problems to solve. She's already seeing how the techniques help her in her normal math work. She is now probably the top math student in her class. In the Beestar online math tests [...], she is ranked high in the honor roll. I'm very pleased with this book. It makes math fun to my daughter again!

Loved this book... it is very entertaining and teaches a lot of good concepts.
A lot of the techniques are not original. But they have been put together very nicely in this book. I bought the other book by Arthur on the same topic (Mathemagics: How to Look Like a Genius Without Really Trying ) and found that a very good addition to my math books. The current book is a much enhanced and cleaned up version of that.
I do part time teaching on Math to High School students and use this book for some good ideas...

While the author seems to be a very good "stage mathematician" and a lot of his explanations try to explain the "show" aspect of the tricks, for a more complete collection of math tricks, I also refer to book by Meyer.

Very recommneded for Math enthusiasts and more for High School students.

I have bought a number of different books like this to find different ways to help my 14 year old who struggles with arithmetic and is falling behind in school as a consequence. I find this to be the best of them because it has all of the techniques found in other books in one place. The light hearted presentation is really great and the author really helps by suggesting ways to think e.g. How to talk in your head. More importantly, the techniques appeal to my kid and he is making progress.

My only beef is with the kindle edition. No hyperlinks between exercises and corresponding answers plus the examples are presented as images so they don't increase in size when you choose a different text size for reading. I think Kindle editions should take steps to exploit the different medium and not just replicate the hardcopy. You can zoom in on those images but it is cumbersome. If you don't absolutely need the ebook I recommend choosing the hardcopy version. On a positive note the kindle edition does not appear to be plagued with copious spelling errors like so many other titles.

I recently purchased this book after a stranger in a bookstore suggested it. I'm already impressed. There are quite a few 'speed math' books out there, but this one is easily accessible to everyone and is intended to help with everyday life. I'm fairly advanced in college-level math and I intuitively knew some of the suggestions in the book, but it has helped me brush up, learn new things, and most of all learn how to do it BETTER.

I highly recommend this book to students because it is a tremendous help to know how to perform quick math in your head. Even if you have a calculator, just knowing what to expect for the outcome helps you perform faster and serves as a double-check when you need it. And knowing how to do math quickly is essential on a standardized test like the SAT. Even if you know how to do all the problems correctly, the time limit can cripple you--so do yourself a favor and get this book.

Some of the topics covered in this book include 'basic' to 'advanced' multiplication, mental division, guesstimation, calculating the day of the week, and memorizing numbers through mnemonics.

This book is great! This book teaches you tricks that really work and really makes you wonder how people came up with them.

One thing I wanted to reccommend - Although this book is for mental math, going through it, I always kept a pencil and paper by my side - some of the concepts/tricks were a little abstract to simply read and absorb the first time around, so they needed a couple of examples (on paper) to solidify the 'trick' for me. After I worked out a couple of problems on pen and paper, I was able to grasp the ability to do them mentally.

One of the best things this book teaches is guesstimation and more importantly, how to forumulate your 'guesses' so you are not so far off from target. I had been doing guesstimation for ages but the methods mentioned in the book were pretty good guidelines for my future guesses.

This book is a must have for anyone that is afraid of numbers because these simple tricks will make difficult math problems a little easier to deal with. The time saving techniques this book is filled with can shave seconds off of your problem solving skills which, come test time (math test, SAT, any test which involves math), you'll be thinking about this book and thanking the author.

This book is very well written. I have always done well in math classes. I never really enjoyed mathematics though. This book makes what seems impossible possible. If you ever wanted to be able to square a number like 72 in your head in seconds this is the book for you.